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Violet Ice Cream
1/3 cup Yvette Cordial 1 small bunch violets Violet coloring Mix first four ingredients. Remove stems from violets, and pound violets in a mortar until well macerated, then strain through cheese-cloth. Add extract to first mixture; color, freeze, and mould. Serve garnished with fresh or candied violets; the light purple cultivated violets should be used and the result will be most gratifying.
Neapolitan or Harlequin Ice Cream Two kinds of ice cream and an ice moulded in a brick.
The text as printed is incomplete: it calls for mixing "the first four ingredients" but lists only three, and the missing ones are almost certainly the cream and sugar base used throughout this chapter (Farmer's Philadelphia-style ice cream is thin cream and sugar, sometimes with a little scalded milk). Treat this as a flavouring formula to be added to a quart of sweetened cream rather than a complete recipe.
- The missing baseSomething on the order of 1 quart thin cream (or half cream, half whole milk) with 3/4 to 1 cup sugar, stirred until dissolved, would suit a quart-scale ice, but the proportions are a guess and cannot be recovered from the text as printed. Bear in mind that a large quantity of alcohol will keep the mixture from setting firm.
- Yvette CordialCrème Yvette, a violet liqueur (the modern reissue also carries berry notes), which went out of production in the later twentieth century and was reissued much later, though not reliably available. Crème de violette is the closest substitute; a violet pastille syrup plus a neutral spirit also works.
- Violet coloringPeriod purple colourings were often got by combining a red such as cochineal with a blue such as indigo, though the book does not specify what was meant here. Modern equivalents are a drop each of red and blue gel colour, or a spoonful of violet syrup, which colours and flavours at once. Keep it pale lilac; a strong purple reads as artificial.
- Which violetsSweet violet, Viola odorata, and garden pansies and violas are edible. African violet (Saintpaulia) is a different plant entirely and is not used in food. Do not use florist flowers, which are routinely treated with pesticides not approved for eating.
- Pounding and strainingThe mortar work extracts a very small amount of perfume from a very small bunch of flowers. A short cold infusion in the cream, covered, for an hour before straining gives more scent than pounding does; violet aroma is volatile and is easily lost with heat.
- Freezing"Freeze" here means a hand-cranked pail packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. A domestic ice cream machine gives the same result; churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then transfer to the mould.
- MouldingPack the churned cream into a chilled metal mould or loaf tin, cover with parchment and a lid, and ripen in the freezer at least three hours. To unmould, dip briefly in warm water. The Neapolitan note that follows is a separate item: two ice creams and a water ice pressed into a brick mould in layers.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts on the assumed base, serving eight to ten. Alcohol keeps it soft, so serve it straight from the freezer.
Violet was one of the great flavours of the late nineteenth-century confectioner's shop, alongside rose and orange flower. Fannie Farmer's instruction to use "the light purple cultivated violets" reflects a period when sweet violets were a serious commercial crop — grown under glass around Rhinebeck, New York, and in Devon and the south of France — supplying corsages, scent, and the candied petals that decorated hotel desserts. Floral ices fell out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, when violet came to be associated with soap and pastilles rather than the table, and the taste is only now being recovered by cocktail bars that revived the liqueur itself.